What It Really Means to Enable Innovation
Everyone will tell you they want innovation. Yet all too often, we treat it like a product to buy instead of a culture to build. We’ll sit around and talk about it all day, but few will actually live it.
The truth is, innovation isn’t something you install; it’s something you enable.
And truly enabling innovation is about more than money, software or slogans. It takes people willing to think differently, processes designed for adaptability and leadership courageous enough to trust both.
Enough is Enough: Construction Needs Leaders Who Are Real
I’ll never forget that sunny vacation morning, sipping my coffee out on the deck and enjoying the view. Then my phone rang.
“We need you to do this meeting today.”
Day in and day out, we preach “core values”, but when the rubber hit the road, feeling valued is an afterthought. And that’s the nature of construction, isn’t it? This constant gap between what we say and how we actually behave.
The truth is, construction has a culture problem, one we created ourselves. So, how do we fix it?
In Construction, Overload Sounds Like “This is Stupid”
There was a moment about a decade ago, one of those moments where it clicked. In the midst of a massive tech overhaul, a superintendent stopped me with, “I’ve got eight different logins, five different interfaces and dozens of manual workarounds.”
That’s when it hit me: it wasn’t that these folks hated technology. They hated drowning in technology.
At the time, I didn’t have a word for it. But now I know it was my first real-life encounter with cognitive load. And in construction, we’ve been quietly letting it chew away at productivity, safety and morale for years.
Goals Are Great, But Systems Protect the Margin
Anyone who knows me knows I love a good challenge. Sometimes too much. But despite all the plucky optimism I might attempt to muster chasing after an audacious goal, it will never be enough. You simply don’t succeed because you aimed high.
You succeed because your systems didn’t let you fall.
In construction that fall can happen fast, so how do we avoid it?
Risk Averse: The Overlooked (and Inevitable) Gift of Failure
Failure is one of the greatest teachers we’ll ever have…yet construction tends to treat it like an embarrassment.
At the end of the day, every win is built on a graveyard of failures. Somewhere along the way, someone tried something, fell short, dissected what went wrong, adjusted the plan and tried again.
So instead of running from it, how do we build learning from failure into our culture?
